1. Technical Field of the Invention
The present invention is directed to a method and system for selecting a wireless network access point for offloading network traffic from another network. More specifically, the method and system for offloading network traffic includes determining a measure of the relationship between the user of the wireless user terminal and the owner/operator of the access point for the second network that can be used to provide an indication of the likelihood that the owner/operator of the access point will grant access to the user of the wireless user terminal.
2. Description of the Prior Art
In so called “walled garden” environments, such as cellular networks (voice and data), the network is fully owned and operated by cellular operator and the cellular operator controls all aspects of access to the network. Conversely, the ownership and management of local wireless networks, such as WiFi networks, are owned and operated by many separate entities (individuals and companies) and thus form a fragmented and heterogeneous collection of wireless networks. While cellular data network resources tend to be limited (both in terms of bandwidth and access locations) and in many locations utilized to capacity, local wireless resources tend to be readily available and underutilized. In many situations, it may be desirable to enable a wireless user terminal, such as a smart phone or cellular connected device to offload some or all of its voice and/or data communication functions to a local wireless network, such as a WiFi network. This enables cellular network carriers to expand their user capacity without the added expensive of cellular resource equipment (e.g., cellular network towers and transceivers, microcells, etc.).
However, because the local wireless networks are fragmented and heterogeneous, there are many different technologies (e.g., IEEE 802.11 a/b/g/n, WiMAX), access methods (e.g., WPA, WPA2 WEP, Captive Portal) and many different and diverse owners/operators, obtaining access to these diverse networks can be a complicated and tedious process.